Ugly is as ugly does

I'm afraid thing have been rather quiet around here, largely thanks to a bad cold which has made it impossible to attempt anything more intellectually demanding than watching Top Gear.

Actually, even that proved too much yesterday evening, when I must have dozed off in the middle of their African Special quest for the source of the Nile or something and woke up blearily wondering exactly when they were going to get to Mordor with the Ring.

Blimey - Gandalf's let himself go a bit!

I realise, though, that I have as yet said nothing on the nefarious doings of Huhne and Pryce, a topic ripe for myriad speculations and reflections.

We've already seen the unusual spectacle of a jury falling by the wayside - the result, I wonder, of modern trends in crime novels and TV series? These days, thanks to the therapy habits of our transatlantic cousins, every fictional malefactor has their deepest psychological recesses mined and analysed for motive and mitigation.

In asking about the effects of Ms Pryce's religious beliefs, were the jury subconsciously erring into the well-trodden territory of the contemporary crime drama rather than a court of British law, seeking the sort of resolution they have come to expect in their nightly entertainment?

And just when you thought the rogues' gallery was full - hypocritical Huhne, his vindictive spouse and her current beau (I use the term very loosely indeed), Denis 'Laptops' MacShane - the fragrant Constance Briscoe rears her officially not-at-all-Ugly head again.

Ms Briscoe, you may recall, is the author of one of those real-life misery memoirs that are lapped up with unseemly relish by the sort of reader who claims to find them 'life-affirming' or 'inspirational'. In it, she described in lurid and lucrative detail the mental and physical abuse she allegedly suffered at the hands of her mother.

This appears to have come as something of a shock to her siblings, who subsequently supported their mother in a legal battle to clear her name. After a hard-fought case over decades-old accusations made by her  barrister daughter, the mother lost and was left facing crippling legal bills.

But what's this? Prosecutors are apparently deciding whether to charge Constance Briscoe with lying to police over the Huhne-Pryce speeding points affair, casting more than a little doubt on her honesty in the face of official questioning, and some in high places seem to agree:

Mrs Briscoe-Mitchell was last year able to postpone demands for her to sell her house at a High Court hearing, pending the outcome of the court case against Chris Huhne and his former wife Vicky Pryce.

As a general exercise in loss of credibility, this case has it all. I am not unsympathetic to Ms Pryce's plight when faced with the emotional blackmail of her husband's potentially career-wrecking speeding points but, from then on, everyone involved in the case, Ms Briscoe included, seems to have acted with a startling lack of prudence, self-respect and dignity.

I wondered at the time of the Briscoe trial whether the unanimity of the jury in favour of the misery-memoir author owed more than a little to the popularity of the genre and to the Oprah Winfrey-inspired ethos that strict veracity was not as important as 'emotional truth', and that to quibble was somehow wrong and disrespectful - imagine a juror who shares the opinion expressed by one of Winfrey's viewers; "The fact squad; those people make me sick!"

If Mrs Briscoe-Mitchell does indeed take up her libel case again, it will be interesting to see whether changed times will bring a change of outcome. Though if the jury in Vicky Pryce's first trial is anything to go by, she'd probably better not hold her breath.

Misery Memoirs and a Trip to Tyburn

As regular readers may have noticed, it’s been a bit quiet around here recently, largely due to a week in which the terms overtime, root canal and budget have been bandied about too frequently for peace of mind. In need of cheering up, I visited my local bookshop today – the one with a slightly eccentric notion of classification.

Since my last visit, a new category has sprung into being; a shelf label now proudly announces ‘Unfortunate Lives’. Under this, a handwritten card bears the following description: ‘A special feature showcasing lives of individuals struggling with adversity.’

Showcasing? Showcasing? Why not just go the whole hog and call it ‘Let’s have a good old vicarious wallow in someone else’s misery while congratulating ourselves on how caring we are'? And someone not only thought the term appropriate for these horrible books, but thought so for long enough to write it out neatly on a card and tape it to the shelf.

Since Mis. Lit. was publicly embraced by Oprah Winfrey – no stranger herself to lucrative abuse memoirs – as ‘life-affirming’ and ultimately uplifting redemptive therapy, the floodgates have opened. In imitation of the sainted Winfrey, Britain’s Richard and Judy ran a sort of ‘more abused than thou’ phone-in competition, giving viewers 2 minutes to pitch their harrowing real-life stories - the prize, a publishing contract worth £25,000.

There have been efforts to resist this revolting trend – the Observer lifted its voice, Cassandra-like, three years ago to warn of the rapid development of the genre, asking plaintively, "Whatever happened to, say, ‘Little Women’ or ‘Cider With Rosie’?” With supreme irony, a google ad at the end of the online article invites you to ‘sell your story for CASH’.

Which brings me neatly to the market for this kind of thing. Who is buying it in such quantities that publishers are churning it out at unprecedented speed? What do they hope to gain from reading of repellently sadistic acts? Are they really any different from the crowds who once flocked avidly to bear-baitings or the public hangings at Tyburn?

A clue, perhaps, can be found in the Sun’s report of a 12-year-old girl’s mistreatment of a dog, filmed by a ‘sickened’ neighbour for 13 minutes (hat tip to Unenlightened Commentary), and more specifically in the way that the Sun’s website helpfully included the footage so ‘readers’ could appreciate it for themselves.